


Spectra

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Drama, Fix-It, M/M, Romance, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-01 07:37:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6508894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prism with three faces. (Colorblindness/soulmates AU.)</p><p>[ALL OF THE SPOILERS for '03/CoS.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So people were like, "[DAMN, where's all the CoS!Roy/Ed?](http://fullmetalfreak.tumblr.com/post/139816102015/i-need-more-cosroyed-in-my-life-never-enough)"; and then Mthaytr was like, "DAMN, where's all the Roy/Ed with the sexy pining?", and then they were like, "Also, remember that incredible [soulmate-colorblindness](http://pandacea.tumblr.com/post/122975646919/royed-au-where-everyone-is-colourblind-until-they) [AU that Panda made](http://pandacea.tumblr.com/post/129804483085/royed-au-where-everyone-is-colourblind-until)?", and somehow I forgot how much CoS eats my brain.
> 
> Anyway, this thing basically wrote itself over the course of a week and a half – which was something of a miracle, really, because I've been so burned out on pretty much everything that it was an incredible relief to feel like writing was fun and easy and natural again.
> 
> tl;dr I wrote this over a month ago; y'all know the drill with [my life these days](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shambles). But now that I finally found the energy to reread it, I'm actually kinda pleased with how it turned out, so that's… something. :'D
> 
>  **ETA:** It's been pointed out to me that I just sort of fling y'all into this thing without ever actually explaining the premise – check out the gif sets linked above! The basis of the AU is that everyone sees in black and white until they make physical skin-to-skin contact with their soulmate, and then everything appears in color. :D

At least Roy’s alive.

It was touch and go in the Gate there—colors in and out; everything fucking swirling, and all that noise in his head; the cacophonous cavalcade of more information than any human being could hope to grapple with searing through the fragile fabric of his puny little mind—but Ed couldn’t tell if the fade to black-and-white and back was because the Gate was just like that; or because he himself was dying; or because Bradley was giving Roy a hell of a run for his fucking money.

And when he landed, he had other problems—namely, the fact that he’d fucking woken up at all, let alone buck naked on the floor of the same damn bedroom in the same damn flat that Hohenheim had had before in that place called London, down two limbs and up a scream hanging halfway between the base of his throat and the tip of his tongue.

He wasn’t supposed to wake up.

That wasn’t the fucking trade.

And he _panicked_ —fucking flung himself upright, hop-ran downstairs without even _thinking_ about crutches or how to move or any of that shit; he never quite figured out what he did, or how he did it, but somehow he followed sounds and careened through the whole place and ended up crashing into the doorway to the sitting room.  That was a safe enough spar to cling to in a fucking storm, so he held onto it and scanned the room and fixed his fucking gaze on Hohenheim, who had a dinky little ornate teacup raised halfway to his open mouth.

Ed didn’t have time for that shit.

“Where’s Al?” he asked.

To what Ed would later recognize as Hohenheim’s enormous fucking credit, the man just blinked, smiled wanly, and said, “I’m not sure, Edward.”

Then he turned to his whole tea party full of openly-staring fucking middle-aged friends, added “Excuse me for a moment,” set his teacup down, stood up, and ushered Ed off into the kitchen—which required putting an arm around Ed’s shoulders for him to lean on, which made Ed _rankle_ , but there wasn’t time for his pride or his feelings or any of that shit, because—

“Where’s _Al_?” he managed again, and his voice started shaking this time, but he pushed the fuck through it.  “I was—okay, wait, help me out here.  Last time, I didn’t _give_ anything to go through the Gate to get here, right?  It’s just—dying.  That’s what does it.  You die in a fucked-up-enough way, you just _go_.  Right?”

“Based on both of our experiences,” Hohenheim said slowly, “that sounds like an accurate representation of eve—”

“But he gave me back this shit,” Ed said, gesturing to the empty shoulder and the stump of his thigh.  “With the Stone.  Only now it’s gone again, so that was a toll for _something_ , right?”

Hohenheim, watching him very closely, nodded once.

“Because I was trying to give up fucking _all_ of it,” Ed said, sounding ever-so-slightly fucking desperate even to his own ears now, but who the fuck could blame him, when—?  “Only I’m _here_ , I’m alive, more or less—so what the fuck is that about?  What the fuck did I pay for, exactly?”  His heart pounded far too loud—once, twice, three times, straining against his ribcage, echoing in his ears.  “How much of him did I buy back?”

He saw her again, so fucking vividly—visceral down to the smell of the gore and the dreck and the dank walls of the dark basement—that his knee gave way, and only Hohenheim’s fast fucking reflexes to catch him kept him from slamming his dumb ass down on the floor.

“Careful,” Hohenheim said, which was a stupid thing people always said after the fact, which Ed had always sort of hated, but at least it was a decent gesture or something.  And Hohenheim was easing him into one of the kitchen chairs, which was nicer still.

Ed sat.  Ed stared at the floor.  Ed put his hand out and felt the back of the chair, and then the table, and then the tin of loose leaf tea that was still sitting out on the table.  He considered eating one of the leftover biscuits, but the thought of it made his stomach fucking _roil_ , which made him suddenly aware of the fact that his whole fucking body felt like it was churning or collapsing or on fire—or, in some notable places, all three.

“Edward,” Hohenheim said, quietly, “breathe.”

“I’m fuckin’ _trying_ ,” Ed said, and he was, but there were little shadowy spots wavering in front of his eyes, and he gripped the table edge to make sure he stayed fucking upright.  “Backlash, I guess.  Just—shit, do you think—I mean, it must’ve put him _back_ , right?  It’s got a shitty-ass sense of humor, but it must’ve put him back; that’s how it works—that’s how equivalent exchange works.  Sure, it’s bullshit when you apply it on a universal scale, but with _alchemy_ , that’s the fucking point, and this was alchemy; this was straight-up fucking circles and light—”

“Edward,” Hohenheim said, sharper this time.  “ _Breathe_.”

“I fucking _know_ ,” Ed said.  To fucking prove it, he sucked in a huge fucking lungful of oxygen and held it in his mouth with chipmunk cheeks, glaring up at the douchebag playing at Dad of the Year.

Hohenheim had to fight a smile.  What a fucking asshole.

“That’s a start,” he said.  “Sit still; let me get you some water.”

Always with the talking down and the giving orders—never mind that this particular set of instructions made a hell of a lot of sense given how hard Ed’s whole body was shaking.

“He must’ve made it,” Ed said as Hohenheim went for the tap.  “He must have.  That’s how alchemy works.  The rest of it’s shit, but that’s how alchemy _works_.  And I traded—I mean, even if it didn’t take what I planned for, I’m stuck here.  Right?  Which leaves me with more than I intended when I paid, but not a _lot_ , ’cause… fuck, all I really got back was three-quarters of a body, right?  So the rest of it—all of the rest of it—must’ve gone to Al.”

Hohenheim turned to glance at him.  “That’s what I would assume.”  The asshole brought over a water glass.  There wasn’t any particularly shitty way to hand your twice- or thrice-abandoned progeny a glass of water, but if there had been, he probably would have done it like that.  “It doesn’t always… calculate, I suppose you would say, especially literally, either.  There are a lot of things it might include in the exchange that you wouldn’t have accounted for—unquantifiable things, concepts.”  He paused.  “Your access to people.  Emotions.”  He glanced down at Ed’s solitary remaining hand.  “Abilities.”

Ed could practically fucking hear the gears in his own brain grinding together as they tried to mill that one.

Hohenheim pushed the water glass closer to his hand.  “Drink this,” he said.  He paused again, and his gaze slid towards the doorway towards the living room, where his probably-scandalized-as-shit guests were still sitting on their stuffy asses.  “After that, we should probably find you some pants.”

It occurred to Ed that Hohenheim had just done something he’d never fucking done before: he’d stuck his neck out for Ed and taken care of him first and foremost—instantly, reactively.  On instinct.

He’d acted like a fucking dad.

That changed things, a little bit.

Ed drew a deep breath, let it out, and lifted up the glass, which felt heavier than it should have.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Okay.”

  


* * *

  


It was only when he was lying down that night that the rest of it finally struck him.

He’d been thinking—in an aimless, wandering, overwhelmed sort of way; with the tattered remnants of his battered brain.  He’d been thinking about how fucking surreal it was; and at the same damn time, how fast he’d already started adjusting.  The human brain was an extraordinary, inimitable fucking machine sometimes—it chewed up stimuli and spat them right the fuck back out.  It was the most adaptable thing in the world.  Hell, in a matter of about five seconds, he’d adjusted to a colossal alteration in his own visual perception of the world after a _lifetime_ of a single expectation—

And the realization hit him like a leaden fucking anvil dropping into his guts:

The fucking _color_.

He still had it—still saw it.  Right?

He did, didn’t he?  He fucking—he hadn’t even _thought_ about it; the concept hadn’t even crossed his mind through all of the fucking chaos and the emotional-pinball fucking ricochets back and forth and sideways and upside-down—

But he remembered—

There’d been _colors_ in the kitchen, hadn’t there?  He still had—

And that meant—

He scrambled up and started to hop across the fucking room; of fucking _course_ he slipped two feet from the desk and ate hardwood, then had to drag himself up, then had to fumble frantically with the lamp until he caught the switch, and—

Yellow.

Definitely fucking yellow; definitely not fucking black or white or gray or—

Roy was alive.

Roy was fucking _alive_ , and that was something, wasn’t it?

That was one fucking victory chalked up in his column, no matter how much else he might’ve lost.

  


* * *

  


Life goes on.

The trick is not letting it go on without you, even when a part of you would rather just get left behind.

  


* * *

  


Is every sunset in Amestris as gut-wrenchingly gorgeous as the one he saw that night?  Was it just because it was the first one in color, or was it because of what was in front of him?

Sunsets are nothing fucking special here.

Just—gray.

Everything is gray.

Some mornings he’s so fucking terrified of the cloud-dimmed monochrome that his first impulse is to cut himself open and watch himself bleed.

He tacks shit up on the walls—red, green, blue, orange.  Scraps of paper; advertisement fliers and doodles in different-colored pens.  Samples to look at when he’s not quite fucking sure anymore.

It doesn’t go away—the color.  Some days it’s so muted he fingers his pocketknife, and the agitation runs through him like an electric fucking current; but it doesn’t go away.

That’s something.

Right?

  


* * *

  


He always just figured it was bullshit.  He always just figured it was a pile of fantastical romantic nonsense; he always just figured the reason there weren’t any hard and fast facts about it was because it was a load of _crap_.

Izumi never taught them about this.  His mother never said a word.  And he didn’t think to ask anybody else—it was stupid anyway, right?  It was a stupid, schmoopy thing for silly, lonely people, and he had better things to do.  He had a job—a mission.  He had Al.  He had a score to settle, and other people kept tallying more fucking marks.

He never even dreamed of asking any of the questions he needs answers for now.

Does it still count if you become somebody different?  Does it still count if the world you live in twists you up on the inside so violently that you don’t even know yourself anymore?

Is it only literal death that wipes the colors from your sight again?  Or does it count if one day you’re no longer the person that you used to be?

Can it happen to _one_ person?  Can you meet someone who fills in all your jagged goddamn edges, but the completeness only goes one way?  Why doesn’t it apply to platonic kinds of love and shit, too?  Did his fucking _parents_ have it?  He’s got these fuzzy recollections of surprise that his mother never seemed to need to touch the tomatoes to know when they were ripe, but that could just be his own brain rewriting shit retroactively; brains _do_ that; they believe what they want to believe—

Can it happen to a single person twice?  If your soulmate dies, is there such a thing as second chances?

Can you have two at _once_?

What does it mean in the grander social scheme of shit, right?  Do you have to _get along_ with them?  Does it always work out?  Obviously you can— _have_ —that—with someone and still kind of want to throttle them and/or punch their fucking lights out at intervals; he’s more-or-less-living proof of that.  Evidently you don’t turn into fucking Armstrong at the drop of a hat—at the tap of a fingertip—and start spewing roses everywhere or whatever shit.

So what _is_ it?  What is it _really_?

If it can’t be platonic—he and Al prove that part, because if there were ever two people more attached, he’s never fucking heard of ’em—then it must have something to do with… love.  Right?  But that’s a nebulous fucking concept to say the least, and it’s not like there haven’t been flickers of fury and light in his stomach and his throat and his chest over other human beings than Roy.  Sure, if you crunch the numbers, the bastard’s probably leagues ahead of anybody else who’s ever roused the whole range of Ed’s emotions, but—

Then again…

It has been a while, hasn’t it?  It’s been a while since Ed couldn’t ignore the throbbing in his guts when Roy’s mouth curved into a smirk, and the dark eyes flicked towards him.  It’s been a while since he did his damnedest to burn it out, and all he got was a mouthful of curses and a deep, unshakable conviction that Roy would die for him, if it came to that.  He doesn’t know why he knows that, but it’s true—same way the stars are; same way as the sky: fixed and bright and inescapable no matter where you run.

Maybe they’d be something.

Maybe if their hands met again—maybe if it was more than that; more skin; maybe if it was fingertips and palms and mouths and eyelashes—maybe if they had more _time_ —

He knows he didn’t have a choice—or that he did, but he’d already made it, and the wheels were already in motion, and lingering would only have thrown him onto the fucking tracks and hacked him the fuck up.  He had to go.  It was _Al_ ; it was for Al; all of it’s always been for Al, and that’s how it should be; everything he’d ever cared about was on the fucking line—

No fucking possibility in the world—no matter how scarlet-orange it spills—would be worth that.  No abstraction, no mist-edged potential, could pay for what was at stake.  Nothing in the _world_ could pay for that.

So he turned his back and walked away.

And there wasn’t time to mourn it.

There’s time, now.  There’s time to think in guilty little cold-twist threads—with soft, warm tendrils winding outward, towards a thousand things he’s never known—

There’s time to wish for shit he can’t have and hasn’t earned.

Shit he doesn’t deserve.

Shit that he has to let go of, for his own damn sake, so he can keep it together and get the hell out of here one of these days.

So he asks the questions—solid, scientific inquiries.  He digs his heels into the logic instead of walking the tightrope wires of the endless fucking _what-if_ s.

What’s it tied to, physiologically?  If you lose something—a hand, an arm, a _heart_ —does the connection dissolve?  Do the colors go away?  Or do you lose some finite part of the spectrum, and you get to keep barf-orange (which Ed wishes he didn’t know) and olive green?  What’s the anatomical mechanism—?

Hell.  This stupid-ass fucking world is full of science—that’s its solitary redemptive fucking feature, as far as he can tell.  Maybe there’ll actually be some literature worth investigating, and he can find out.

  


* * *

  


Sometimes—

Sometimes, when it’s late; when he’s tired, and his brain is wrung-out-empty, and there’s nothing more that he could do towards heading home and finding Al even if he _tried_ —

Sometimes, he lets himself wonder.

Lets himself imagine.

Lets himself pretend.

Maybe there would be a night—maybe a few nights; maybe lots of nights; maybe _every_ motherfucking night; maybe—

Maybe there would be nights where he’d go over to Roy’s place.  He doesn’t know what the hell Roy’s place looks like, so he makes it up—narrow foyer, cramped kitchen, set of stairs.  That shit doesn’t make much of a difference except to set the scene anyway; he focuses most of his imaginative power on the study, which has all the books and curios and shit; and the living room, which has a fireplace and a couch; and the bedroom, which…

Well, the bedroom has Roy—dark eyes, smooth hands, and the little real-smile Ed only ever got to see on special fucking occasions.  It was barely more than a myth for ages, but then there was a time when Ed saw him on one of the lawns trying to feed Hayate, and Roy didn’t know he was there, and when Hayate licked the bastard’s fingers, he just—

 _Smiled_ —

Without any of the smirking or the goading or the smugness or the bullshit; just for its own sake.

So that’s what Ed dresses him in.  Maybe it’s unfair or something—maybe it’s fucking arrogant, actually; maybe it’s presumptuous of him to assume he’d be able to draw that out.  What the fuck is he even capable of that could make Roy happy, anyway?

Maybe he wouldn’t have to do anything.

Maybe that’s part of what it means.

Maybe they could just—be.  Just be together; just _exist_.  Maybe that’s the point—maybe it’s about identifying someone whose charred, twisted, fucked-up little fragment of a soul can settle in with yours.  Maybe it’s about broken edges that finally fit.  Maybe it’s about somebody already having a little pocket in their battered fucking heart that’s shaped like you, and all you have to do is drop right in it.

Maybe it’s not even about—love.

Maybe it’s about acceptance.

Maybe it’s about understanding.

Maybe it’s about _wholeness_ , in a way you’ll never find all on your own.

And maybe that’d be enough to start Roy smiling—if Ed just naturally filled up some of the emptinesses that he’s been carrying for his entire life.

That’s a nice thought.  Does Ed deserve a nice thought or two?  People say thoughts are free, but people say all kinds of shit that they don’t mean, and nothing’s free.  Not really.

Ed lays his left arm over his eyes and tries to forget—tries not to hear the city; tries not to hear the pipes in the walls or the neighbors past them.  He’s not here—not right this second, anyway.  He’s home.  He’s in Amestris.  Al’s fine; Al’s _great_ ; Al’s all flesh and blood and beaming grins; he doesn’t have to worry about that.  He can worry about Roy’s hands, and the way the drowning sun set fire to the whole world around them in that single moment before the dark drew in.

He can ghost through the imaginary foyer, past the kitchen, past the books—up the staircase, trailing his fingers on the banister; he’s at home here; he’s afraid of nothing.

He can push the bedroom door open.  Roy’s sitting on the edge of a bed with a thick white down comforter over the top.  He stands up and meets Ed halfway—meets him, and takes his hands, both of them; Ed registers the automail, but Roy doesn’t really seem to see it, and—

They—

Kiss.

Ed’s not quite sure what it’s supposed to feel like, but that’s not really the point.  For now it feels warm and sweet and safe and soothing—feels the way that chocolate tastes.  Not especially concrete; indistinct but _good_ ; it’s like a hug but closer, sharper, quickening his blood.

Roy leans down to rest his forehead against Ed’s, but for once in his obnoxious life, the bastard’s not dumb enough to comment on how far he has to tilt his head to get there.  He lifts his hands up and lays them along either side of Ed’s jaw.

“It was always you,” Roy says.  “All this time; it was always _you_.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Guess you’re stuck with me.”

“Likewise,” Roy says.

The contours of Roy’s face get kind of blurry.  The eyes are clear as fucking day, but the little things—the exact way his hair lies, what size his ears are—are starting to get lost.

“Fucking wait for me,” Ed says.  “God, Roy, fucking— _please_.”

“I have let you down,” Roy says, “but I have never betrayed you.”  The same two fingertips—to Ed’s lips this time.  “Remember that.”

  


* * *

  


Things have gotten worse.  Well—“worse” is subjective, but probably nobody would argue.

Ed’s been around the block enough damn times to know that things usually get worse before they get better.  He’s also been around long enough to know that sometimes they don’t get better at all.

Sometimes your asshole dad’s exhaustive letters just stop coming, and nobody at the university—nobody you used to know, no matter how many telegrams you send across the Channel—can tell you why.

Sometimes you meet somebody who looks so much like the person that you live for and left behind that it bowls you right the fuck over—and it’s so much like being stabbed straight through the fucking ribcage that you’d swear you can feel the hot blood streaming down your sides.

Sometimes you have no choice except to go through whatever’s passing for your existence feeling like there’s a film over everything—like you can push and prod and claw and scrape, but you never get through it, never _touch_ anything—

Sometimes you sort of figure that the punishment was the fact that you survived.

Sometimes you wish you hadn’t.

And sometimes you can’t drown it, can’t dull it, can’t fight it.

Sometimes you don’t think you can hold on anymore.

Sometimes—

Alfons runs the palm of his hand just centimeters above the delicate faces of the forget-me-nots.  They’re the same damn color as his eyes.

The really funny shit—Ed wishes there was someone he could share it with—is that Ed never knew how much he himself looked like a fucking dandelion until this color thing.  It’s ridiculous.  It’s a _riot_.  Al would laugh; fucking _Roy_ would probably laugh, if he’s even capable.  He must be; that’s a human thing.  What does his laugh sound like when it’s not so fucking sarcastic it’s unrecognizable as an expression of joy?

“You always gets the brightest ones,” Alfons calls to Gracia where she’s bent over some roses.  “I don’t know how you do it.  These are like the sky in summer.”

That’s a pretty high (ha) compliment from Alfons; the sky is about his favorite thing on—well, off—the fucking planet, so—

Ed stops.

He stares at Alfons—clever fucking fingertips still dancing in between the tiny little petals.

Ed’s voice comes out in a strangled fucking wreck.  “You can—you can see—that?”

He knows Alfons fucking loves him in a way he’ll never be able to reciprocate.  But it doesn’t—work that way.  Does it?  Sure, they’ve brushed past each other before; they live in a fucking closet together, after all, but it’s not… It can’t be one-sided.  Can it?

Alfons stays very still.  With his hand raised and his whole body frozen, he looks like he’s baiting a wounded animal with some questionable food.

“See what?” he asks slowly.

The words cling to the tip of Ed’s tongue— _The colors, do you see the colors?  Who is it?  God, please,_ please _, fucking tell me it’s somebody else, anybody else; tell me it’s not me; I couldn’t_ do _that to you; that’s way past “unfair” and well into the territory of “ungodly”, although I guess it’s all the same_ —

But while the syllables sit and tremble there, his heart beats twice, and something sparks inside his brain.

Flags.

The flag for this miserable country—it’s black and yellow and red.

Why the fuck would it be three specific colors, two of them close on the spectrum, if nobody could _see_ them?

Why would Gracia group some of the flowers by their shade, not their type?

Why would there be such a fucking thing as _weisswurst_ if they didn’t have a distinction of pale shades other than white?

“Nothing,” Ed says, and his tongue tangles clumsily, like swallowing around a mouthful of stones.  Fuck words, and fuck speech, and fuck German, and fuck this whole fucking _universe_ — “I—never mind.  I thought I—saw something.  Sorry.”

All this time, he wasn’t listening.  He wasn’t thinking about it—he just assumed the rules would stay the same.

What a fucking idiot.

He deserves this—all of it.  This is the fucking price.

“Sorry,” he says again—like it matters; like it means anything; like it makes a difference against the long, long, long-ass ledger of failures and wrongs.

He can feel that Gracia’s stare is all confusion, but Alfons’s is—gentler.  Vulnerable.  Kind.

Ed hates him for being so similar at the core sometimes—so close, so _desperately_ close, and still so fucking far.

“It’s all right,” Alfons says.

It’s always all right, with Alfons.  He doesn’t have the slightest fucking idea what’s going on in Ed’s stupid head at any given moment, and he puts up with all of it anyway—and that’s _so_ like Al.

Only there are moments where Ed surfaces from a stream of thoughts and catches him watching Ed’s face with this half-startled, wholly-puzzled sort of expression—and in those seconds, he looks like Roy.

“Sorry,” Ed says, and moves past before they ask any more fucking questions, and the heavy fake leg creaks beneath him all the way up the stairs.

  


* * *

  


He lies on his side that night, staring at the gold foil filigree on the label of the bottle on the desk.  The cheap cognac doesn’t pull enough anymore to drag him across the barrier between the haze of pain and the haze of sleep.

All this time—all this time, everyone in this whole damn world had the sky and the grass and the river and the marble walls; everyone had wildflowers and ladybugs and Gracia’s soft gray-green eyes.  None of that was his alone.  That’s par for the course here; maybe it’s one of their returns on the dues that they pay for living.  Maybe it’s their equivalent of alchemy—an ordinary magic anyone can own.

All this time, he’s been bullshitting himself.

Roy’s probably dead.

Even if he bested Bradley, somehow, against a thousand fucking steeply-slanted odds, Archer was on his fucking scent; and even if _that_ didn’t finish him, the fucking military would never stand for seeing their idols felled by an upstart like _Roy_ —

Roy’s probably dead.

Al might be, too—not dead so much as not-alive; never-alive; unwritten and undone.  Not-brought-back.  Hovering in the emptiness of the Gate somewhere, contemplating Ed’s squandered fucking sacrifice.

Or maybe they never fucking lived, right?

Maybe this is the real thing, and all of that was his vivid fucking imagination, cooked up overnight so many times he started to believe it as a fact.

The brain is incredibly fucking powerful, sometimes, after all.  It has the power to deceive, and the power to dissuade, and the power to destroy itself.

But most days it makes more sense the other way around—this is the dream.  This is the unknown, unknowable shadow-life, cut out of nightmares held up to the light, woven out of threats and death and miseries.  This is a world where nothing _works_ ; where money’s getting meaningless; where children starve routinely, and no one even cares; where hope withers, and faith fails, and the sunlight’s weak enough to bleach the color out of almost everything.

When he dreams about home, it’s still in color.

Does that count for anything?

On the scales, in the books—

He knows the answer to that.

He knows that no one’s listening.

That’s what it really means—the word _alone_.

He should get his ass killed and get it over with—it’d be so damn easy, in a place like this, where there’s violence in every smile, where the potential for cruelty lingers on every indrawn breath.  He could kill himself with the cognac if he tried at it, and maybe he should—it’d be better, wouldn’t it?  He’s been the anomaly everywhere he’s ever gone.  He’s the sore spot; he’s the snag; he’s the problem, and if he’d just _remove_ himself—

But there’s a chance, still.  He hasn’t gathered up enough proof either way.  There’s a chance that Al or Roy or both of them are still on the other side of that towering doorway, alive and fucking kicking.

He has to know for sure before he does anything he can’t take back.

He has to get back somehow.

He has to _know_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I die, bury me in CoS Roy and Al interactions. Bury me _deep_.
> 
> Also, regarding things I suck at explaining in the body of the fic: Panda's [second epic gif set](http://pandacea.tumblr.com/post/129804483085/royed-au-where-everyone-is-colourblind-until) is **critically important context** for this part. So, like… pay attention to it, so I don't have to write better. :'D

To say that it’s a phone call he doesn’t want to make is understating matters.  This is well beyond the pale of quotidian procrastination; this is a conversation that Roy has put off for two solid years.

It ought to be time now, whether he likes it or not.  He’s not in North City especially frequently—more often they send the supplies up to him, by way of either a courier or a well-meaning former subordinate, depending on who’s available.

The line rings—once, twice, echoing towards a third.  Then it catches, and he forces himself to breathe out slow.

“Hello?” Gracia says, sounding tinny and distant and utterly unchanged.

None of it really changed when he abandoned it—none of the important things; none of the important lives are _less_ without him in them.  That’s part of what makes it so damn hard to care.

They went on without him.  They’re probably better off.

“It’s me,” he says, and a considerable portion of him wants to apologize—for disturbing her; for imposing; for the fact that he still exists.  _Exists_ is the only word for it; _lives_ is too generous, and he’s been past generosity since long before he dragged his miserable body all the way out here.

She’s quiet for a long moment.  He doesn’t blame her.  What is there to say?

“What can I do for you?” she asks at last, sounding completely unperturbed—whether because she really is or because she ironed the surprise out of her voice in the interval he can’t derive.

“Nothing,” he says.  “Nothing at all.  I just wanted to see how you and Elysia were doing.”

“We’re fine,” she says.  “And you’d have heard by now if we weren’t, and you know it, which means that you’re looking for something, and I’m the only person you think can give it to you.”  She hums almost inaudibly—a tiny tuneless noise half under her breath.  “You also called while Elysia’s in school, which means you don’t want her to hear whatever you want me to say.”  There’s a faint smile in her voice.  “So what can I do for you, Roy?”

He forgets, sometimes—how damn _smart_ she is.

But not for very long.

“When Maes died,” he says, “the—color.  It went away.”

Silence.

There’s a faint buzz down the phone line, and then she takes a breath.

“Yes,” she says.

“And it never came back?” he asks.

She’s quieter for longer this time.

He listens to his pulse in his ears—gaining speed; growing louder; battering at every last crumbling wall of his defenses.

Anyone else would have asked—by now, if not before—why he’s posing cruel questions for no apparent purpose. 

“No,” she says.  “It didn’t.”

The pattering of his heartbeat turns to thunder.

She deserves to know, deserves to _hope_ , as much as anyone—more than most.  One of the boys she took in like an adopted son is missing, presumed dead; and the other doesn’t know her anymore.

She deserves to know.  She loved him, too.

“It’s Ed,” Roy says.  “He’s alive.  He has to be alive.”

“What?” she says, and then— “Oh, God.  _Roy_.”

Far, far too smart.

They both know that’s one of the things Hughes loved her for the most.

“Everyone says he just disappeared,” she says.

“I know,” he says.  He does.  He knows every square centimeter of the antiquated temple; knows every tormented block of the city underneath.  He knows that there is something living in the shadows.  He knows that the Philosopher’s Stones scattered in the water there are a startling magenta-pink.

“He wouldn’t leave Al,” Gracia says.  “Wouldn’t leave him like this, I mean—alone, without any of the answers.  He must—do you think he made some sort of an exchange that cost _his_ memories, too?  Maybe he didn’t know who he was anymore; maybe he up and left; maybe…”  She makes a soft, dry noise—something like a laugh.  “I suppose you’ve already considered all of this.”

“I’ve had time to think it over,” he says.

Hughes had cried—he had turned up at Roy’s door at one in the morning, eyes sparkling with the wet already, and when Roy grabbed his elbow and hauled him in and asked him what the hell was wrong, the first breath that shook loose of him was a sob.  He just kept _smiling_.

_Nothing’s wrong—oh, my God; it feels like nothing’s ever going to be wrong again.  Roy, it’s real.  All of it’s real; everything they say—the_ colors _, Roy—_

It took ten minutes and a cup of tea to calm him down enough to be coherent.  Roy thought he was drunk.

No.  Roy hoped, Roy _prayed_ , that he was drunk, because if he was telling the truth—

_We were at dinner, right?  And we both reached for our drinks at the same time, and our hands brushed, and—Roy, I can’t describe it.  It is past words; it’s—colors.  The color thing.  Her eyes are green, Roy—same color as trees and fields and emeralds and all these things I never… Everything is so much deeper when there’s color in it—so much_ more _.  The world is so fucking beautiful, Roy.  She’s so beautiful.  It feels like I’m dreaming, but I swear to God I’ll die if I wake up now; I can’t lose this—I can’t lose her; her eyes are_ green _, Roy—_

Roy had believed in it when he was young, with the kind of unthinking, optimistic credence most children give to fairy tales.  And he’d tried—he’d gathered every wisp of purity left in him, and he’d _tried_ —to keep believing as the years went on.

When he met Maes, he gave up.  Because their elbows touched, and nothing happened; Roy waited, and watched, and _wanted_.  Because the rest of the pretenses gave way to something raw and real and absolutely breathless, and Roy’s fingertips tracked every _inch_ of that man’s skin—and nothing happened.

He was in love.  He felt it, knew it, in his chest and his guts and the framework of his bones; he was captivated and possessed, and there was nothing left to sacrifice; this was what they _talked_ about.

So evidently they were wrong.  Evidently it was all a lot of hyped-up, spun-out, romanticized nonsense conjured by old folks who wanted to justify the tumults of their marriages over time.

Evidently they were wrong, and it didn’t happen like that, and Roy mapped and memorized every line of Maes Hughes’s body in ordinary black and white.

Except—

Except.

_Her eyes are green, Roy—there aren’t words for it; you can’t encapsulate something like this—God, I hope you get to feel it, Roy; I hope you get this, too—_

And it figures, doesn’t it?  He always thought the punishment was that he’d never have it—that the very capacity had been torn away; that he’d burned it out of the core of himself with all the rest of his humanity, and the opportunity was gone forever.

But this fits better—this makes more sense.  This is a more appropriate twist of vengeance from the universe.  Tasting the potential for a single, stunning, transcendent fraction of a moment only to have it torn away—

To have to live with the possibilities of what they _could_ have had; to know some infinitesimal sliver of a chance still lingers for redemption, as long as the colors cling to every surface other than the snow—

To have the gift of partnership—of _acceptance_ —placed gently in his open hands, and then to have it snatched out and flung into the ether just before he drew his fingers closed.

To be told _There is someone who will always fight for you_ ; and then to hear the whisper: _But he’s gone_.

Gracia sighs quietly, and he wonders how long he’s been silent on the phone.  “What are you going to do?”

He was a commander, once—a leader; a vanguard; he made snap decisions without hesitation, and he never looked back.

“I don’t know,” he says.  “I’ve been corresponding with Alphonse.  He has quite a few ideas, some of which are staggeringly brilliant, and some of which are borderline unhinged.”

There’s a little smile in her voice again.  “Edward would be proud.”

Edward would be scared.

Edward would be terrified of what Alphonse Elric, determined and alone, has the power to become.

She doesn’t need protection, but it’s not his place to disabuse her, and it’s not the time.  “I’ll let you know if we come up with anything better than a list of ‘maybe’s.”

“Please do,” she says.  She hesitates, and her voice softens slightly.  “It’s good to hear from you, Roy.”

It’s kind of her to say that, despite the fact that it would probably be better for everyone if he had died on the Führer’s front stairs.

But Gracia Hughes is the sort of person who understands that spilling new blood doesn’t wash out any of the stains that set before.

“You, too,” he says.

  


* * *

  


It stays so damn pale up here for so many weeks on end that it’s a good thing he has to keep the fire lit to survive; it reminds him that gold exists.

He tries to lie very still—on his side, facing the fireplace, with his eye most of the way shut.  That’s when the tips of the flames’ fingers look the most like the color of Ed’s hair.

Beautifully ironic, isn’t it?  Mere minutes after he started to see the world for _real_ , he had that ability reduced by half.

He peels off the patch to sleep, up here, in the safety of solitude.  No one but the medical staff has ever seen him without it—not even Riza, though she tried to prevail on him with logic for weeks on end.  She’s likely right: her encounter with the initial damage, soaked in his blood and Selim’s, probably eclipses any horror that the knitted remnants might instill in someone with a weaker constitution.

All the same.

All the same, it’s not even what it looks like so much as what it means.

That’s one of the things that’s such a damn relief up here: no one sees him, so what he looks like has become functionally irrelevant.  It’s a shame, too, given his talent for turning other people’s observation of him into an exquisitely pointed sort of power, but ever since _this_ …

Removing it, cavalierly, like it’s just another item of clothing to be shucked aside at night—that’s a bitter, petty, desperate little feature of the fantasies alone.  He knows full well that he couldn’t bear to chance Ed cringing at the sight of him.

But in the little, idle dreams—

As he lies awake and listens to his dogged heart still beating, watching the clever acrobatics of the flames—

He imagines just… dropping it—on the nightstand, to the floor.  Eschewing everything it fucking stands for, and rolling over, and burying his face in the flood of Ed’s bright gold hair and breathing _deeply_ —

He barely ever thinks about the sex—just the skin.  Just running the palm of his hand slowly up and down Ed’s bare side; just warmth and scars and ribs.  Just folding in against him, settling close around the curve of his body—hooking an arm around him, knitting his own fingers with the cool metal ones splayed out on the sheet—

And maybe Ed would mutter something about him being sappy; maybe there would be some sleepy plays at protesting; maybe Roy would nip his ear as a gentle reprimand and brush kisses down the side of his neck to apologize—

One touch.

One fucking touch was all they _got_ —all they ever had; maybe all they ever will.

He’s not stupid enough to think that it’s not fair.  On the contrary, this might just be the single fairest consequence equivalent exchange has ever meted out.

That doesn’t make it easy.

That doesn’t kill the fucking pain.

If Ed were here; if Ed were _anywhere_ ; if Ed…

If Ed were his, he might just have the strength to try to make up for the rest of it.

If Ed was in his reach, life might just be worth suffering.

  


* * *

  


The next time he’s in North City, he has a telegram.

It’s a matter of deeply-ingrained habit to check at the office, but there’s almost never anything waiting—he’s the embodiment of _out of sight, out of mind_ as far as the brass are concerned; the less they acknowledge his survival, the less they have to face the fact that there was something for him _to_ survive.  It’s better to forget that he exists—better to pretend he never did.  Better to assume he’ll waste away up here, slowly, one frostbitten finger at a time, and sink into the snow.

Most days, he’d welcome it.

He draws off his gloves, and the woman behind the desk glances at the braided bracelet on his left wrist.  Elysia made it for him—with the wide-eyed solemnity of a serious child, she told him that it was a friendship bracelet, to help remind him that no matter how far from home he ranges, as long as there’s love in his heart, he’s not alone.

It’s red and yellow, not that she would know.  He knotted it on so tight it’s never slipped, and there’s not enough light up here to make it fade.

The woman at the desk hands him the slip of paper, and she smiles.

“Came in last week,” she says.

He makes his mouth smile back, and then he steps away towards the window to read it.

_ATTN Private R Mustang, c/o North City telegram office_

_FOUND SOMETHING STOP.  WILL VISIT BY END OF MONTH STOP.  STAY WARM STOP.  —A.E._

He pockets the half-sheet of cardstock, thanks her, and crosses the office to the bank of telephones.  He thumbs in his change, dials the direct line, steels his nerves, and waits.

“Office of Lieutenant-Colonel Riza Hawkeye,” Maria Ross’s voice says crisply.

“It’s me,” he says.  “Is she available?”

“For you,” Ross says, “I think so.”

A part of him always wondered—always feared, he should say; no shame in admitting it.  A part of him always feared that her feelings towards him were a wretched mirror image of the ones he’d had for Hughes.

She cares about Ed as much as any of them, but it feels like you’ve been cheated—when someone else sweeps in with promises of colors and what used to be a myth, and all of the devotion that you’ve gathered up and poured out of your soul ceases all at once to matter.

There’s static on the line, and then it settles, and then her voice—unerringly collected, as always; like the hounds of hell slavering on her very heels couldn’t hope to earn a scream.  “Sir?”

“You don’t report to me anymore,” he says.

“I’m poignantly aware of that, sir.”

They both know that he’s the greatest disappointment in the whole of her life.  They both know that she thinks he’s a coward for giving up.  They both know that a part of her loves him like a brother, maybe more; and that a part of her wishes he’d died that night before he could do this to her, to all of them, to the country that he pledged his life to.

But he knows that there’s only so much that a man can carry before something in him breaks.

“I got a telegram from Alphonse,” he says.  “He said he found something.”

So much silence on these phone calls—it’s a criminal waste of change.

“We haven’t seen him,” she says.   _We_ in this context would refer not just to the team, but to the larger network of informants she inherited from him.  “I don’t imagine he specified what he found.”

“Vague and/or deliberately misleading telegrams are an Elric tradition,” Roy says.

The breath she lets out sounds almost like the second-cousin of a laugh.  “True.”

They both know she thinks he’s a little bit mad—or that he might as well be.

They both know she thinks the bullet grazed his brain in such a way that it jarred a few things out of order, and one of those things was his retinal nerves.  They both know she thinks he’s invented every color that he believes he’s seen since the moment in the basement where the world went dark.

She could be right.

She’s always been the realist, between them.

“If you see him before I do,” he says, “drop me a line.”

There was a time when the two of them were incapable of being awkward.

It’s funny, how much life is like an avalanche—if you lose a piece that’s large enough, the balance shifts, and all the others start to slip away.

Somehow he always thought she’d stay—always thought she’d be stable just beside him, no matter how many times he let her down.

That’s why he doesn’t deserve her, really.

“Certainly, sir,” she says.

He pauses.  He doesn’t want to push the line; he doesn’t want to scrape a razor blade across a wound that might well still be bleeding.  But at the same time, all those years of cooperation and camaraderie haven’t just disappeared, and he genuinely wants to know.

“How are you?” he asks.

“Swamped,” she says.  “It’s remarkable how much paperwork there is even when you do it on time.”

“Part of why I never did it on time,” Roy says.  “It was an impossible task regardless.”

“I think _impossible_ is a bit of a stretch,” she says.

He smiles slightly.  That sounds more like her.  “How’s Hayate?”

“Spoiled rotten,” she says.  “Lieutenant Ross is a sucker.”

He hears a distant protest that might just be _“I heard that!”_

“All he has to do is look at her, and she melts,” Riza says.  “It’s a travesty.  Military discipline gone out the window.”

“Tragic,” Roy says.

“She’s telling me I have a meeting,” Riza says.  “Which could be a lie for revenge, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the risk either way.”  It’s her turn to hesitate.  “Don’t be a stranger.”

“Thank you,” he says.  “I’ll be in touch.”

Is it still a lie if his intentions are decent at the time?

He knows the answer to that.

He hangs up the phone, and then he makes his way through the dusted snow towards the general store.  If he stops in at North City’s solitary sweet shop to buy a dozen of the caramels that Alphonse likes on the government’s dollar—

Well.  They bought his youth, and his faith, and his allegiance, and they ground it all into the mud.  They can spare a couple cens for candy.

  


* * *

  


Alphonse is an Elric echo—an imprint of Ed, like a woodcut; the shape’s identical, but the details smear.  He arrives at midnight, and the lamps inside the cabin spill out on a coat the color of bloodstains on the sand.  His hair is darker than his brother’s—cinnamon, not sheaves of wheat.  The gray-brown eyes aren’t quite as old as Ed’s were, but they’re getting there.

“Hello,” the boy says.  “Sorry, I left later than I meant to.”

Fortunately, every time someone’s in danger of confusing one Elric for the other, Alphonse identifies himself with a polite apology.

“Quite all right,” Roy says.  “Just come in before you get hypothermia.”

“I haven’t been out _that_ long,” Alphonse says, shuffling in.  He brushes snow off of his sleeve with the hand not burdened by a suitcase which looks much too familiar, and the airy comment is more than a bit belied by the purple tinge to his lips and the detectable chattering of his teeth.  Roy shuts the door behind him, plants a hand on the center of his back, and propels him bodily over towards the fire.

The thunk of his suitcase on the floorboards speaks volumes—or, more likely, speaks _of_ volumes, crammed in so close their spines are liable to split.

“Thank you,” Alphonse says as Roy lifts the snow-dampened coat off of his shoulders and hangs it on one of the hooks by the stove.  There’s a thick fleece lining to it now, as there appears to be to the gloves he’s peeling off as he crouches down in front of the fireplace.  He spreads his hands out towards it.  “Did you hear?”

Regardless of the precise topic of the question, Roy knows the safe bet for the answer: “Probably not.”

Alphonse looks at him for a second, and Roy takes back what he thought about the eyes.

“Teacher died,” Alphonse says.

“I’m so sorry,” Roy says.  He knows how precious little the inane expressions of sympathy actually matter, but it’s better than nothing.

Alphonse shrugs slightly, turning towards the fire again and chafing his hands together.  “I’m mostly worried about Sig.  Mason said he’ll look after him, and I’m going to try to call every week or so, but he’s taking it…” He winces.  “I suppose he’s taking it about as well as you’d expect.”

A part of Roy wants to ask if the Curtises had it—the connection; the colors; the bond.

But a part of him has come to believe that it is, in a lot of ways, _more_ admirable for two people to choose each other every single day of their lives if nothing metaphysical compels them.

“But in a way, that’s why I’m here,”  Alphonse says.  “She made me swear once that I would never set foot in Dante’s house.  Now that she’s gone, I didn’t figure that promise held anymore.”

One of the curious things about the Elric brothers was always the contrast—the balance.  Everyone Roy knew assumed that Alphonse was the gentler of the two—that the weak spot for small animals and the desperate striving to stay human in an armored cage somehow proved that he was soft straight through.  Ed’s explosive fits of anger fooled a lot of people into believing his bravado—into accepting that the shortness extended to his temper, and his patience, and the capacity of his heart, not just his size.

Roy saw it differently.

Roy knew that Ed was putting on a persona, exaggerating his idiosyncrasies, to keep the whole world at a distance—just like Roy had been doing for so many years that it was hard to tell what was mask and what was matter.

Roy knew that underneath the genuine sweetness and the compassion for all living beings, Alphonse was the ruthless one.

Roy knew Ed would die for his brother, but Alphonse would kill for Ed.

And now the younger Elric is trekking resolutely down a different track—solitary, single-minded, without Ed to moderate his pace.

“So I went,” Alphonse says.  He settles cross-legged and cracks open the suitcase; as Roy had presupposed, it’s overflowing with dusty books.  Alphonse stares down at them for a second, and then he looks up at Roy.  “It’s an incredible resource.  I found things no one else in this country is likely to have—things no one else in this _world_ is likely to know.”

He grazes his fingertips over the cover of one of the dozen selected tomes, and the silence stretches perilously thin.

“But that house,” he says.  “It shouldn’t… exist.  It’s a bad place—a wrong place.  Too much has happened; too much has been done.  Terrible things.  They’re embedded.  Ingrained.  It’s in the walls.  You can hear it when you stay still.”

Roy has known a place or two like that.

Alphonse draws a breath, holds it, and lets it out slowly as a sigh.  “When Brother gets back—”

There it is—sentence constructions that won’t brook the conditional tense.  The Elric certainty.  It’s a trademark, like a tattoo.   _After we’ve executed the improbable with impunity, here’s my plan for what’s next_.

“—we should inventory the books,” Alphonse is saying, stroking the one under his hand again.  “We should keep anything we think is useful.  And then we should burn that place to the ground.”

Roy hasn’t spent much time piecing together that quadrant of the puzzle, but he knows enough—enough to guess at what Alphonse might have seen.

“What did you find?” he asks, gesturing towards the books.

Another deep breath, and then a reckless Elric grin, because knowledge is power, and Alphonse hasn’t accumulated enough for it to betray him yet.

“All _kinds_ of stuff,” Alphonse says.  “Apocrypha about all of the taboos—there’s so much in here about this… Gate thing.  The portal of Truth.  Brother’s notes were steeped in that.”  He traces a fingertip along the imprinted letters of the title.  “I think… I’m starting to think there’s a—duality.  Of some kind.  A syzygy.”  He drums his fingertips on the book cover, and his eyes go hazy as he stares at—or, rather, through—the wall.  “All of the verbiage: ‘gate’, ‘portal’—those are doors.  And there’s something on both sides of a door.  With the right impetus, you can pass through.”  His fingers tap faster.  “But that’s rare, because it’s difficult—because there’s a toll to pay for that, too, and usually it’s blood.”

Roy wishes it was a question, and he wishes he sounded incredulous.  That’s a side effect of the Elric brothers: you start to trust the nonsense they come up with, because they might well make it plausible after a while.

“You think Ed slingshotted himself through,” Roy says, “when he tried to give his life up to bring you back.”

Alphonse nods once.  “Maybe it’s more apt to think of it like—a mirror.  Anyone who attempts human transmutation arrives at the Gate.  Teacher did; she didn’t like to talk about it, especially since she had an idea why I was asking, but I know that much.  So any alchemist who doesn’t respect the laws can _see_ it, but most of them get reflected back, so to speak—they stay on this side.  It takes an _immense_ amount of force to break through it instead, but if you do…” He chews on his lip, tilts his head, and glances up at Roy.  If puppies were capable of ferocious feats of logic… “I think that’s what I’m dreaming about—the other side.  It’s all analogues.  There’s a boy there who looks a lot like me, although he’s older, and Ed’s met lots of other people who are nearly identical to the ones we have here.  Either the fates of the two sides are somehow tied, or they diverged from a common origin extremely recently.”  He worries his bottom lip harder between his teeth.  “So the real question is—how do we leverage enough power to pull Ed back?”

“That sounds like a dangerous prospect,” Roy says.

The real danger is the gleam in Alphonse Elric’s eye as he smiles grimly back.

“Yeah,” he says.  “It does, doesn’t it?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three guesses who meant to rewatch all of the relevant parts of the end of '03 and CoS but ended up too fucking depressed to care if the fic details were accurate and made stuff up instead~! :'D
> 
> (Admittedly, many of the relevant details are ones I basically committed to memory while watching the same scenes over and over and over for Frozen Flame, but if you see anything inaccurate, I'm afraid I… don't care. XD)

Al thinks about blood a lot.

And white.

Sometimes both at once.

He thinks about hinges, and the scrape of steel, and about liminal spaces, and about a little flower shop on the corner of a street.

“You could try Rosé,” Colonel Mustang—he doesn’t like it when Al calls him that, but nothing else sounds right out loud—says.  “The last time I spoke with her, she couldn’t remember much—she said they were in the sewers, and then she faded out again; she thinks it might have been some kind of alchemical version of hypnosis.  Ed sent her up the stairs to the church and told her he was going back to ‘finish it up’.  More of it might have come back to her by now.”

Al taps his pencil eraser against the page of his notebook.  Brother frequently wrote in pen.  Al aspires to that kind of confidence.  “I tried to go down there—to the city underneath the temple.  It was cordoned off.  Military police.  I tried name-dropping, but they didn’t believe me.”

Colonel Mustang smiles thinly, stands, and crosses to the desk against the wall.  Al already knows that the first drawer is full of bottles of brandy in various stages of consumption; apparently the second is full of sheaves of papers and envelopes and other stationery-related miscellanea.

The colonel rummages—well, _rummages_ isn’t the right word; Roy Mustang has probably never _rummaged_ in his life; every motion he makes is considered, controlled, and deliberate—through the collection and draws out a stack of photographs rubber-banded together.  He looks over at Al, and it’s a wonder anyone survived an encounter with him back when he had both eyes to incinerate people with.

“Why do you trust me?” Mustang asks.

“Because Brother did,” Al says.  “And that didn’t come easy to him.  Based on the ranting in the margins of a lot of his notes, it seems like you lied to him more than once, but he knew that when the chips were down, you’d back his play.  I don’t suppose he ever told you, but that mattered to him a lot.”

Colonel Mustang holds the stack of photos in the palm of his hand—he hasn’t gone so far as to stretch it out and snatch it away, but the import of a prize that Al has to earn is unmistakable.

“And?” Mustang says.

Al eyes the photographs.  They’re wrapped in a sheet of tissue paper to protect the prints from the rubber band.  He can’t make out any of the images.

“And you were a commander,” he says, slowly.  “A man of action—or at least of instigating the actions of others.  You’ve been here a long time now, out of all of the games.  I think you miss it.  And I think you’re tired of waiting.”

Mustang’s smile is only fractionally warmer than the blizzard Al trekked through to get here.  “And?”

“And,” Al says, meeting his intractable eye, “you’re just about all I’ve got.  Winry’s the only other person on the planet who believes he might have made it—and she’ll deny it, if you ask her.  She says she let it go, and that things happen, and all of that, but there’s stuff in her workshop that can’t be meant for anyone else.  Besides which—she wouldn’t have reached out to _you_ if she didn’t have a reason that outweighed her own feelings.”  He raises his hands.  “May I?”

Mustang steps forward and deposits the photographs into Al’s waiting palms.

“I wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into,” Mustang says.

Al unwraps the pictures carefully.  The first few are of the outside of the old temple; that’s familiar enough that he can flip through them swiftly to get to the ones edged with shadow—like they were taken from a doorway, or some kind of arch.  The foot of the stairs that Colonel Mustang just mentioned, perhaps?

The reports weren’t exaggerated.  There’s an entire _city_ down there.

“I have no idea what I’m getting into,” Al says.  “But I know where I’m coming from.”

“That’s something,” Mustang says.  He pulls up a chair next to where Al’s been sitting on the floor, leans down, and points at the photograph in Al’s hands.  “I went directly to the theater first—that’s where Rosé said they last were before he ushered her out, and it seemed like he was headed back in that direction.  After that I made a fairly full circuit documenting everything I could.  There was blood in the elevator, and half of the floor was destroyed—like someone had taken an enormous bite out of it.  Lieutenant-Colonel Hawkeye says that one of the homunculi is still down there.  I suppose he’s feeding off the Stones.”

“Delightful,” Al says.  He eyes the colonel.  “I thought there was only one Philosopher’s Stone.”

“Only one of any substance,” Mustang says, “as far as I can tell.  They imbrued you with it in Ishval while you were in the armor—attached it to you somehow.  I suspect you did something drastic, in recompense whereof Edward did something even worse.”

“He wouldn’t have let me one-up his sacrifice,” Al says.  He’s made it to one of the ballroom shots—he squints at the rich, draping velvet and the rows of lights, _willing_ himself to remember something, anything, some fragment, some _dream_ …

Nothing comes.

“I’ll go to Liore next,” he says.  “It’ll be nice to see Rosé, whether or not anything has come back to her.  It’s been a while.”

Mustang looks at him for a long moment, then stands up and crosses back to the desk.  “I don’t have much else to offer you,” Mustang says.  He sorts through a few more papers and retrieves a small set that’s stapled together.  “These are the only transcripts I have—there wasn’t time to do many interviews between when they let me out of the hospital and when they served me the demotion.”

Al takes the papers, looking up into the dark eye framed by the curve of the patch.

“I’m going to get Brother back,” he says.

He doesn’t say _Or die trying_ , though he thinks they both can hear it.

  


* * *

  


The earthquake in Liore is what gets reported, but the earthquake is only the beginning.

In the aftermath, Al feels like a live wire in a downpour—shorting, sparking, feeble, frantic.  Rosé puts her hand on his shoulder and guides him just inside the orphanage.  When they’re out of the sunlight, the mountain of a man beside her lays one huge finger gently underneath Al’s chin and lifts his face up, the better to start peering at his eyes.

“Mr. Armstrong,” Al says, because of course that’s who it is, and that _almost_ sounds right on his tongue, “is there a telegraph office here?”

Armstrong must have known his brother very well.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t hesitate.

“Is it terrifically urgent?” he asks.  “I think it would be ideal to have you examined by a medical professional as soon as possible, to be sure there aren’t any—”

Al swallows _It’s not the first time I’ve passed out after dividing up my soul_ , as that might make it worse instead of better.  “It is a bit urgent, honestly.”

Armstrong and Rosé exchange glances.  The little boy hiked up in Rosé’s arms tugs at her hair.

“Very well,” Armstrong rumbles.

  


* * *

  


Al tries to keep it short, because characters are expensive, but there’s so much to _say_.

_WENT THRU SAW HIM TALKED TO HIM STOP.  WE WERE RIGHT AND IT WILL WORK STOP.  COME TO CENTRAL STOP.  PLEASE STOP.  NOT STOP STOP BUT TELEGRAM STOP._

Darn.  Oh, well.  In a few days, he might not need money anymore anyway.

  


* * *

  


From the moment he hits the foot of the stairs in the underground city, with Wrath’s hair whipping around the corner just before him, everything becomes a blur.

He’s been thinking a lot about blood, and liminal spaces, and unnumbered sharp black fingertips extending from the screaming silence of the white—

His guts freeze solid as the almost-familiar monster’s teeth sink into Wrath’s sides.  The gore gushes out of the strange little creature who’d turned into something like his friend—spills, pours, _floods_ —and Al’s whole body turns to dry ice; the vapor chokes him; their eyes meet across the huge expanse of cracked and fissured stone—

Wrath is going to die whether Al uses this array or not.

It ought to mean something—a life.  Even one that’s stolen; even one that shouldn’t have begun.  Even one born out of arrogance and fed on agony straight through.

Al owes him that much—meaning.

So he runs towards the hell he almost knows and claps his hands together and slaps them on the floor.

The illumination blinds him for more than a moment; for what feels like _years_ —

Everything shudders around him; everything happens so _fast_ —like time itself can’t contain this possibility; like this universe rejects the notion that Ed should come careening back into it in a _flying machine_ and crash-land in a plume of smoke—

And it’s only several minute-hours later, when they’re forging through the shattered streets, that Al realizes why his heart still feels so hollow when it’s gotten everything it wants:

Ed hasn’t touched him.

Ed hasn’t touched anyone—hasn’t initiated it, anyway; Winry hurled herself at him.

Either Al did something wrong—something _terribly_ wrong—

But Sheska didn’t even get a handshake.

It’s deliberate.

It’s calculated.

Ed’s not going to stay.

Ed’s going back there, so he’s trying not to get attached.  He’s trying not to let himself get too close to any of them, so that everyone will hurt less when he leaves.

Suddenly so much of Colonel Mustang’s long-term frustration with Ed’s stubborn magnanimity makes perfect sense.

Al has to approach this from an angle that’s indirect—right?  He has to work sideways; he has to get to the point by first moving all the way around it, so that Brother won’t expect him to zero in.

“Is it true?” Al asks.  “The thing about the colors.  Can you see them?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  His stride doesn’t falter.  “But everyone can, over there.  So maybe I just brought it with me.”

“He can still see them,” Al says.  “Colonel Mustang, I mean.”

Ed doesn’t slow his pace a whit, but the fingers of his left hand slowly curl into a fist.

“Good,” Ed says.  “It’s good that he made it.”

Al opens his mouth for _He’s supposed to be here_ , but—

Gunfire strafes the pavement; Ed’s left arm hooks around Al’s shoulder, and he throws them both to the ground.

Al can’t breathe for a long second—the smoke doesn’t help; his heart leapt halfway up his throat and stuck there, slamming, battering at walls—

Ed shakes him, gently.  “Al—hey—”

He drags in a shuddering breath that scrapes at his mouth, his tongue, his esophagus—burns in his lungs and lingers there like a poison cloud.  “Y-yeah—”

Ed’s hand stays on his shoulder for a long second, and Ed’s eyes fix on his.  Al can’t tell what’s deeper—the shadows in them, or the shadows underneath.

“You okay?” Ed asks.

Al holds his forearm over his mouth and coughs into it, trying to clear his throat.  Ed’s gaze lingers on the coat sleeve, and the smile that toys with the corners of his mouth is an awful, cruel, _bitter_ sort of thing.

If Al hadn’t seen pictures of the time in between, he wouldn’t recognize this boy.

Not even a boy—not anymore.  Maybe not for a long, long time.

“Yeah,” Al says, clearer this time.  “I’m fine.”

Ed helps Al up, brushes at the back of the coat—and then withdraws his hand abruptly and lets it fall at his side.

“Right,” Ed says.  “Let’s sort this motherfucker out.”

He musters a real smile this time, so Al offers him one back.

  


* * *

  


Al had heard that it’s typical for Roy Mustang to make an excessively dramatic entrance, but he didn’t realize that an alchemically jury-rigged hot air balloon wouldn’t even make Ed _blink_.

“’Bout fuckin’ time,” Ed says, clambering up onto the platform, and there’s a flash of a grin so wild that Al’s heart flits past a scheduled beat.

“I happen to think my timing is impeccable,” Colonel Mustang says.  A dark eye has no business being that bright, but he’s managed it somehow.  His hair flutters just in front of it, and he slants a little smile.  “I always knew you were alive.”

“Can’t help it,” Ed says.  “Too damn stubborn to die.”  He squares his shoulders and curls his automail hand.  “So what do you say we blow this shit sky-high, and then you tell me what’s up with the new accessory?”

Colonel Mustang’s smile broadens slightly, tilting further until it’s not really a smile at all—it is unmistakably a _smirk_.

“Done,” he says.

A rain of bullets pours out of the body of the ship, and they all hit the deck.  Colonel Mustang wrenches himself upright first, taking cover behind a jagged pillar, and Ed’s only moments behind him—

Al scrambles to follow, only to stop in his tracks as Mustang—

Slings fire from his fingertips.

Like it’s natural.

Like it’s nothing.

Like it’s an _art_.

Like the whole world was built to bend around his hands, made subject to his will.

Ed’s metal hand—Ed’s _metal_ hand; it’s cold and hard and far too strong—latches onto Al’s arm, and Ed hauls him sideways just before bullets split the air again—

Al doesn’t know what to look at: Ed’s grim intensity or Colonel Mustang’s astonishing concentration or the source of the ongoing gunfire or—

“Shit,” Ed breathes, more like a prayer than a curse.  He starts to reach towards Colonel Mustang and then doesn’t finish extending his arm—just leaves it hanging halfway between them.  “Cover me,” he says to the colonel.  “She didn’t expect us to put up a fight.”

Mustang’s smile doesn’t light his eyes.  “She must not know you very well.” 

Ed’s gaze settles on the cavernous hole of a doorway leading into the ship.

“She killed my dad,” he says, and Al’s heart drops—straight out his diaphragm, through his stomach, through his guts, and it doesn’t stop; the ground’s a hundred feet away, and it just plummets heedlessly— “I don’t even know how many more.”

Colonel Mustang lifts his hand, fingers poised, mouth set in a line.

“Go,” he says.  “I’ve got you.”

Ed almost smiles.

He claps his hands together, then smacks one palm against the grille of his automail, and Al’s tortured heart skips one more time—the boy who can transmute without a circle draws a broad blade out of the surface of Winry’s masterpiece, and it wouldn’t take Teacher’s training to see that he knows how to use it.

Before Al can gasp in enough breath to speak—to offer surprise or admiration or solace or _backup_ —Ed’s off and running towards the dreck-edged maw of the open ship.

“ _Wait_!” chokes out of Al’s throat in a cracking scream, and he plants his feet to fling himself after—to follow Ed into that ship, into any cruel unknown; into the depths of any hell that’s ever been—

Colonel Mustang’s arm in front of his chest bars him, and he scrabbles against the wool of the uniform sleeve, but the bastard’s grip is sound.

“Let him,” Mustang says.  “He’s not—”

“I just got him back,” Al says, twisting hard, taking more satisfaction than he should from the flash of pain that crosses the Colonel’s face.  “Youcan let him go again if you want to, but don’t you _dare_ try and stop me.”

Mustang stares at him for a long moment, fingers still clenched in the fabric of Al’s coat.

“I know what to do,” Al says.  “Trust me.  I just need you to get him out of there.”

Mustang’s eye on his is almost too intense to bear, but Alphonse Elric has done worse for less, and he _will_ not lose this time.

Mustang nods once.

Al jerks free of his grasp and pelts towards the ship; over the echoes of the shells and the rush of the air, he can hear Mustang’s boots pounding after him.

The breached ship welcomes them with flares of light from the gunfire—it’s deafeningly loud this close, but Ed darts around the stream of bullets, undaunted and so graceful that Al’s breath sticks watching him twirl out of the jaws of death, flipping clear of peril’s claws without his sharp-eyed focus wavering for a fraction of a move.

That is—right up until he sees Al framed in the open side of the ship and stumbles hard.

The woman with the pale hair, half-fused to some kind of armor, with the monstrous black fluid climbing up her face and the huge gun dreck-welded to her arm, presses her advantage with a knife of a grin.

The snap of Mustang’s fingers barely registers—but the torrent of flame surging towards her startles Al and Ed both back to life.

“Get _out_!” Brother shouts, dropping back into a defensive crouch.

“No,” Al says, and the adrenaline suffuses him straight through, head to toe to tingling fingertips, and he presses his palms together, digs in his heels, and crafts an array inside his head, funneling it through the lines inked out on his gloves.

He slaps one hand against the wall of the ship just beside him: cold metal’s malleable, and a pillar of it juts up next to the armored woman—she’s fast enough to avoid it hitting her directly, but it throws her balance, and she has to stagger three full steps to find her feet.

_“She killed my dad.”_

Al claps again; this time he aims a spike right _for_ her.  This time he wants blood.

She swivels aside, and it arcs past her harmlessly, but Mustang corrals her with a thin wall of flames on the other side, forcing her back before she can take a firing position again.  Ed, knees bent and eyes alight, races towards her, slashing with his bladed arm, and she turns her dripping black machine-gun on him—Al fractures the floor behind her, and she wavers again, firing wide.

Turning away from your target invites defeat, but he has to catch Colonel Mustang’s eye.

Mustang—advancing like a vengeful angel, wreathed in flame, cavalry skirt flooding out behind him like a banner—glances towards him once.

Al jerks his head in Brother’s direction.  In the circles not fooled by the histrionics, Mustang’s famed for intellect.  It’s time for him to live up to that reputation—there’s no opportunity to mouth the word _Now_.

Al thinks he sees a glint of comprehension in that single too-dark eye.

He claps his hands, drops to his knees, and slams both palms down flat on the charred metal of the floor.

The steel turns molten underneath the woman’s feet—liquid tendrils snake up her legs, embedding themselves in the armor, pinioning her in place.

“ _Nice_ , Al!” Brother calls, sweeping towards her with the gleaming blade—

But Colonel Mustang snaps again, and a spiral of flame melts the gun on her arm, and as she howls like a wounded animal, writhing in place, Brother lurches backwards, slipping as the whole ship tilts—

—and lands right in Mustang’s open arms.

Which cross each other over Ed’s chest and tighten so that Mustang can start dragging him backwards towards the exit.

In his element—in a fair fight, if such a thing exists—Ed would be out of that position inside of a second.

But right now he only has eyes for Al dodging around the fallen pieces of the ceiling and the jagged dents carved into the floor—running right for the armored woman, pushing his palms together and then holding them both out open, with the light already crackling down the lines—

“ _Al_!” Brother screams, and the sound chokes off as Mustang presumably hikes him up higher, or hauls him closer to the door; Al can’t risk looking now—

The woman spits words that must be another language’s curses at him, swiping with her arm; molten metal splatters, and a drop of it glances off of Al’s cheek—the sheer vibrancy of the burn almost startles him enough to distract him, but she cannot, _will_ not win this—

He ducks beneath her arm, darts around her, and smacks both hands against her back.

As threads of searing light wind outwards from the impact of his palms, Al circles past her and makes a break for where Mustang is manhandling a kicking, flailing, incoherent Ed out onto the platform.

The brightness pulls on him already as he moves—blurring the boundary between physical and metaphysical; more than anything, it feels like a steel cord wrapping around the base of his lungs, cinching tighter, squeezing the air out of his chest—

“Wait,” he manages to wheeze, and hopefully Colonel Mustang can read lips around Ed’s frantic angry-cat display, because the ambient noise keeps redoubling in Al’s ears, and he’s not sure how much of it is real, and how much is only in his head.

This is bigger than anything he’s ever done before—bigger, and a thousand, ten-thousand times more difficult; he’s never had to _overcome_ another sentient will—

He manages two more steps before the roaring in his head—the hurricane tearing at the edges of the array—swells so large he has to dedicate his whole being to sustaining its lines.  Distantly he senses what must be his knees hitting the metal as he sinks down onto them; something tugs at his hair and his clothes, but whether it’s the wind or someone’s hands is miles beyond him—

“Cut it loose!” a low voice says—an order; a _command_ , and light sears just past his squeezed-shut eyelids.

He has to hold this; he has to hold her there—has to move her arms, one at a time; has to set them on the flight controls—he can figure this out; he can make it work; he just has to _hold the array_ —

A heaving motion sends him sprawling forward; his arms fold underneath him; his short, ragged breaths bounce back cold off of metal—the connection dwindles as she drifts further away; Brother must have severed the platform edge, and the physical distance between him and the ship—

He buries both hands in his hair and curls his fingers, clamping his eyes shut tighter.  Hold it, _hold it_ —

He can _do_ this; the only other fucking option is losing Ed again—

“Don’t touch him!” the voice says again, sharply, but he’s buried too deep in light and sigils and the haze of his brain for it to shake him.  “He cleaves off part of his soul—he’s done it before; it must be how he crossed over to you—”

She fights—she _rages_.  She tussles with him for scraps of control, and he imagines himself scratching his fingernails down every single line of the array; he _pushes_ her—one muscle at a time.  He slams her remaining hand down on a promising-looking lever; he shoves at her until she jerks forward, haltingly, and her weight shifts it.

The ship sputters, shudders, roars—exhaust flares; the whole contraption quakes, and then it moves—

Towards the glowing circle in the sky; she screams so loud he can’t hear his own thoughts, so loud he might as well not even exist—

But he doesn’t need to exist.  He just needs to get her _through_.

The circle has a gravity of its own, and it hauls on her; her scream of protesting fury crescendos between both of their brains; it gouges at him, but he won’t—he _won’t_ —

Forward—forward— _through_ —through the circle; through the—

White.

White space and silence—silence so loud his ears ring with it; silence so loud her last shout dies instantly, swallowed by the deafening wideness of the void.

He tries to breathe, but all there is—

Is emptiness.

And fear.

The woman presses her advantage—chafes against the confines of the glowing lines; scrabbles at the borders; he can feel his face contorting with hers, a perfect mirror image, as she snarls, hisses, tears sharply at the weakest points of his control—

No.

Not now.

Her side wants her back.

The ordinary order of the universe is on his side.

The universe wants to settle back into its natural configurations when perturbed.  She can fight that forever, but she won’t win.

He forces her hand to fall on a promising-looking tube.

He makes her rip it out of the wall.

Fluid pours out—he makes her grab another, tears it loose; sparks fountain everywhere, and several wink out in the spreading pool of spilled fuel on the floor—

And it ignites.

He doesn’t remember too many details from being in Heiderich’s head—least of all because the German would muddle the thoughts filtering back to him even on the rare occasions that his sleep patterns let him stay for more than minutes at a time.  But he remembers that one of their ongoing challenges was trying to make their rocket fuel less explosively combustible.

They never quite figured that out.

The ship keeps catapulting through the empty-silent not-space, and Al lets go.

The woman’s willpower hacks through one of the foundational lines of the array, then another—and he lets her; he snaps another one to help; he blots out a sigil in his mind—

And he comes loose.

He’s just—a wisp; barely even an entity; just a tiny cloud of smoky consciousness in the vastness of this nowhere-place, drifting pale and aimless.  Instinctively he tries to catch his breath, even though a part of him knows that he doesn’t have the lungs or the throat he’d need to transport air even if there was any.

He wheels weightlessly in the openness; he turns his awareness, somehow, and focuses on—

A door.

A towering monument of stone, ornately carved; and as the center seam parts, the rumbling of it sounds hollow.

A Gate.

Something rustles in the incomprehensibly deep darkness; something whispers.

And then—

The hands from his nightmares—the claw-fingered arms he senses in the shadows when he’s alone at night—

Dozens, _hundreds_ , flung right at him—grabbing, seizing, scratching, clinging, and they snap back and drag him with them, catapulting into the dark—

Thought-concept-image-ideas pummel him from every side—every angle, all at once, crammed into his misty approximation of a brain—

The pressure from everywhere becomes unbearable, but he can’t—

Move, can’t stop it, can’t _run_ —

Someone screams, loud and hoarse, a rasp-edged wail that shatters into desperate, helpless, abject tears, because he can’t _make it stop_ —

“Al!” Ed’s voice says, and he feels—something, something damp and a little bit rough.  Something on his face—he has a face again; he has— “Al, hey—c’mon, look at me—God, _please_ —Al, c’mon—”

The tears feel hot on his cheeks and sting in his eyes and weigh down his eyelashes, but it’s always been so darned hard to deny his brother anything, even when he’s being rash or ridiculous or a jerk.  Especially then, because it’s all just a front, isn’t it?  It’s all just projected to cover the fact that Ed’s spent so much of his life terrified—spent so much time feeling absolutely broken underneath.

Because Ed—

Al blinks up at his brother’s eyes.  They look so much more familiar now.

“It came back,” he croaks out.

Ed’s right hand on Al’s shoulder is gripping much too tight.  Consternation flits back and forth across his face, deepening the lines on his forehead and the half-circles underneath his eyes.

“What did?” he asks.

Al fumbles until he can grasp Ed’s forearm; the world keeps tipping sideways.  “The memories.  I went through the Gate, and it—all of it—”

Ed stares at him.

“She’s gone,” Al says.

As if on cue, the sizzling array cut into the sky wavers, wobbles, and—

Explodes.

Ed throws both arms around Al (the right one might have just bruised his spine), and Roy throws both arms around both of them, and Al can hear the shrapnel that rains on someone’s back, but he can’t feel any of it.

“I propose a motion,” Roy says.  “Specifically, a motion that we get the hell out of here.”

“Seconded,” Ed says.

Al manages to huff a little bit of a laugh.  “Thirded.”

If he’s not mistaken, Roy hugs them both a little tighter before he lets go.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last bit! AO3 has a habit of eating my chapter selections, but I promise this is the end. XD It would've felt unfair to make you guys wait a whole week for a half-sized chapter, so EPILOGUE AHOY.
> 
> Thank you for reading. ♥

Ed’s brain won’t stop fucking spinning.

None of it seems real.  None if it seems solid; none of it will stay put under his hands and turn to stone and be _believable_ —

And if he wakes up tomorrow, and this is gone, he’s taking his ass directly to the roof and then immediately off of it.

But it might—it just _might_ —

Because there’s a burnt-bloodied scrape on Al’s cheek that keeps oozing, and both of their gloves are stained from gently swiping at it; and over and over he sets his back at the wrong angle, trying to accommodate for the weight of the Earth prosthetic instead of the automail, and it keeps throwing him off-balance.  He forgot how smoothly his body turns with the graceful steel instead of the rigged-up mess of iron—on their way over, Al slipped out of sight for a second, and he whirled around so fast that he banged his left elbow into a lamppost.  His whole arm went jagged pins and needles; there’s a pooling tenderness where it’s going to bruise.

That _has_ to be real.  Please, for fuck’s fucking sake, it _has_ to; it _must_ —

And—

Roy.

Roy with black fabric draped across his stupid-perfect face, like it’s in mourning.  Roy with no color bar presented proudly on his chest.  Roy with a tiny quaver of uncertainty to his uncharacteristically careful little smile—

Roy looking at him fucking _constantly_.

Which he only knows because he’s looking back.

He has to split his time between the two of them, though.  Where the fucking hell did Al even find his old fucking coat—or who gave him enough damn pictures to show him how to make a new one?  This place has seriously fucking gone to the dogs since he… left.  Died.  Disappeared.  Whatever.  All of the above.

“It’s just up here,” Roy says, touching Ed’s left shoulder so lightly that he might’ve imagined it—except he could swear he feels fingertips grazing his shoulder-blade as Roy moves past him and starts towards the steps of a small townhouse.  Roy waits until they’ve climbed up beside him—Ed ushering Al in front—before he rings the bell.

This can’t be real.  They walked through the slowly-dimming streets of Central City, and Ed’s heart is pounding, and his feet hurt, and his funny bone still tingles in a recriminating sort of way, and Roy said _Lieutenant-Colonel Hawkeye will hold off the inquest at least until tomorrow—not that she owes me any more favors, but because it’s you_ ; and still Ed’s brain keeps whirling, and it just can’t—

This can’t be _real_.

Shit this good just doesn’t happen to the likes of him.

Not without a trade.

Not without a price.

Not like this.

Not with the door opening inward and framing Gracia Hughes in the warm yellow light.

“Oh, my God,” she breathes.

“Well,” Roy says, and there’s a potent hint of the old smugness in it, “thank you, but not quite.”

Elysia—who is freakin’ _tall_ now, with her hair down past her shoulders and her eyes magnified by a pair of glasses shaped just like her dad’s—peeks out around her mother’s arm.

“Hi, Uncle Roy,” she says, uncertainly.  “Hi, Al.  S’been a wh…”

Well, she’s not the first person to stare at Ed like he’s a fucking ghost, and she probably won’t be the last.

“They said you were dead,” she says weakly.  “My mom’s got pictures, but they said you were _dead_.”

Ed trots out the rusty old devil-may-care grin.  “And you believed ’em?”

She swallows, and her eyes take on a shade of defiance.  She’s got her father’s pragmatic streak, too, apparently.  “Then where were you?”

“A long, long way from home,” he says.

“Good heavens,” Gracia says, like that’s not an oxymoron.  “Come in, please—we were just about to start dinner, but there’s plenty; come on—”

Roy touches Ed’s shoulder again—gently still, but for three full seconds this time—to encourage him over the threshold.  Al beams at him, and Gracia pulls him out of Roy’s reach to hug him tightly, and he almost can’t fucking keep it all _in_.

If this is gone tomorrow—

It won’t be.  It won’t be, because he won’t fucking _let_ it.

  


* * *

  


“Well, goodness,” Gracia says, hands on her hips, lip between her teeth, gazing at her living room like its contents might change under scrutiny.  “Let’s see.”  She waits another moment for more furniture to materialize out of thin air, and then she sighs.  “Why don’t I put you up in a hotel?”

Roy smiles at her, and somehow she senses it: she turns, and he raises his eyebrow.

“I still have the house,” he says.

She frowns at him without much force.  “Good Lord, Roy.  You could have _said_ something before I went into crisis mode.”

“You didn’t exactly give me a chance,” he says.

“You and I both know you have no qualms with interrupting people,” she says, “given how much you treasure the sound of your own voice.”

Ed snorts audibly from the doorway to the kitchen, which makes it exceedingly difficult for Roy to stay composed enough to play affronted.

“In any case,” Roy says, “I tried to sell it, but no one wanted anything to do with me, so I covered everything in old sheets and scheduled an indefinite amount of payments with the bank.”  He makes a point of shrugging.  “More than enough space.”

“Must be huge,” Ed says, “if it used to fit you _and_ your ego.”

Roy turns a sardonic look on him.  Ed’s grinning, but there’s something—brittle in it.  Something fragile.  Something tentative and very, _very_ sad.

All this time, Roy was isolated by his own choice—there were other factors, certainly, but he made the damn bed and laid in it.

Ed was an entirely different kind of alone.

Ed was so far from everything he’d ever known or loved or understood that it’s almost unfathomable, and in a single day, this whole world’s crashed back in around him, cruel and capricious and subtly changed.

“I’d suggest that we can wedge you into one of the corners,” Roy says, “but I suppose we won’t have any trouble fitting you in.”

Ed’s sputtering attempts at argument give way to a laugh so relieved that Roy’s heart nearly strangles itself as it squeezes in too tight.

He’s still recovering when they set foot on the path up to his own doorway.  The lawn is hopelessly overgrown, and the fence needs mending, but all in all, the place has held up relatively well.

He’s glad, now, that despite his frequent resolutions to die up there in the soundless chaos of the snow, he kept all of the old things in a bundle in a drawer, just in case he’d ever feel that he deserved to need them.  It’s an understatement to say that the gloves came in useful; now he can apply the same to the keys.

“What’d you need this big-ass house for, anyway?” Ed asks.  “Orgies?”

“If only,” Roy says, holding the door and earning a brief scowl for his mannerliness.  “It was part of the image I was trying to cultivate.”

“Past-tense,” Ed says, stepping into the foyer and staring unabashedly around himself.

“A lot of things are,” Roy says, closing the door.

Ed puts his hands into his pockets.  Some things haven’t changed: the motion still collapses his shoulders and makes him look smaller—with anyone else, Roy might say _delicate_ , but there’s too much hard muscle in Ed’s back for him to make that mistake.

“Did Bradley take your eye?” Ed asks, looking intently at the shadowed doorway at the end of the hall.

Roy flicks the light on.  “Archer.  Afterwards.”  Ed glances back, and Roy draws a fingertip along the narrow white line down his unencumbered cheek, then traces the shape of the thicker scar by his collarbone; if he had six uniforms on, he’d know precisely where it was.  “Which is not to say that Bradley didn’t leave his mark.”

“What a son of a bitch,” Ed says, but all the piss and vinegar and venom’s gone out of his expletives these days.

“Son of something, anyway,” Roy says.

He can’t help gazing, and then he can’t help smiling, and then Ed’s nose wrinkles in the process of donning the overstated quizzical expression that Roy hasn’t seen in far too many years.

Ed cracks first: that hasn’t changed either.

“ _What_?” he says.  “Do I still have ash on my face, or—”

“Your hair,” Roy says, gesturing towards it.  “That’s the first color that I ever saw.”

Ed goes very, very still.

Roy meets the burning amber eyes—his second-favorite.  No space for cowards here: no time for hesitation; no room for regret.

“I’ll count myself lucky,” he says, “if it’s the last.”

Ed swallows once, twice, three times, and his mouth trembles, and—

“You fucking _bastard_ ,” he says, and he moves like a forest fire—flame-quick and ravenous and inescapable, and Roy stumbles back a step as the weight hits him, and his arms come up too late, and they stagger back as one ungainly ball of limbs and thump against the door—

And Ed’s mouth on his is everything the world ever promised out to better men.

He can’t breathe, and he can’t believe it, and the sheer fucking gratitude almost brings him to his knees.

Ed’s the one who drags them upstairs, peeling layers out of the way—and the desperation makes Roy so giddy that he’s long since given his own brain up for lost.  He just wants to touch—to be allowed to.  He just wants to lay his mouth and fingertips on everything; to kiss Ed’s throat, his shoulder-blade, his wrists, his hands, his hips, his thighs, his toes—

There are some things there are no words for; and there are some secrets better spoken without them—spelled instead in the warm swell of a breath; marked out with the trail of a tongue and the graze of fingernails; built one bead of sweat at a time; burned into the edges of the shuddering ascent towards oblivion—

Ed is so damn beautiful in the half-light.

Roy would have waited a dozen lifetimes.

He wouldn’t have had a choice.

There’s no escaping it—no avoiding it; no reason left to lie.  They belong here—like this, together, bound up, pressed in, _joined_.

He could drink Ed’s little gasps and groans forever.  In any desert, any wasteland, any snowscape sprawling—this would be enough.

This is all he wants.

This is all he ever wanted, isn’t it?  This is all he ever sought.

“Come the fuck here,” Ed says after, and wraps both arms around him, pulling him down to the nested tangle of pillows and sheets.

For a long second, they just lie there, breathing in each other’s heat.

Then Ed splays his metal hand extremely gently on the patch.

“May I?” he asks.

Roy gives himself a second to indulge the fear.

But this is Ed.

Ed is fearless—always has been; always will.

And if their souls overlap now, Roy can be, too.

He catches Ed’s steel wrist gently, tugs it down, and kisses at each plate of the palm.

“Yes,” he says.

Ed’s mouth is red, and his eyes are yellow, and the blood in his cheeks suffuses them with pink like a slow sunset as he smiles, and Roy knows for a fact that he’s come home.

  


* * *

  


Elysia sits on the bathroom counter, swinging her legs, as Al takes the tie out of his hair.

“Do you have to?” she asks.  “It’s so pretty.”

His own faint smile in the mirror is somewhat disconcerting, but everything is somewhat disconcerting right now, so he pushes that thought aside.

“Thank you,” he says.  “And I suppose I don’t _have_ to, but… it feels right.”

She makes a face.  “People’re always saying that.  What does it really mean?”

“I think that depends on the person,” Al says.  He runs his fingers through his hair, sectioning it out, drawing some over his shoulder, working out the knots.  “For me, just now… Well, a lot of things changed for me today.  _I_ changed a lot today.  And with Brother here again, I don’t need this to remember him anymore.”

“I could braid it,” Elysia says.  “I’m learning how—you’ve got so much that I could do two.”

Sparks—a connection in his haphazardly merging brain—

A little girl with dark hair much like his—in two braids, first; and then draggling down over deadened, gleaming eyes; a broad hand reaching out towards her, _his_ hand—

His guts press bile up the back of his throat, and he chokes it down and forces himself to smile again.

“Thanks,” he says.  “But I think it’s time.”

“People’re always saying that, too,” Elysia mutters, folding her arms across her chest.  “It’s nine o’clock, is what time it is.  So what?”

“So I’d better do this quick so that we can go to bed,” Al says.  “Don’t you think?  How about if I read you a story?”

It’s a bit of a gamble—she might be too old for that.

But with the way her eyes light up, he knows he’s won.

“You always used to do the best voices,” she says.  “Will you do the voices again?”

“You bet I will,” he says.

He grabs a fistful of hair and snaps the scissors shut around it.

Strands rain to the tile—he meant to get them in the sink basin; he meant not to make a mess; but he can’t muster a single modicum of guilt, because he feels—

Good.

 _Amazing_.

Whole.

And he knows that Gracia will forgive him.

He knows that any mother would.


End file.
